And Your Little Dog, Too

By Deroy Murdock

As Washington politicians aim to restrict the Second Amendment, they should look in the mirror. The time to control government’s guns is now. Overarmed federal officials increasingly employ military tactics as a first resort in routine law enforcement. From food-safety cases to mundane financial matters, battle-ready public employees are turning America into the United States of SWAT.

FBI agents and U.S. marshals understandably are well fortified, given their frequent run-ins with ruthless bad guys. However — as my old friend and fellow columnist Quin Hillyer notes — armed officers, if not Special Weapons and Tactics crews, populate these federal agencies: the National Park Service; the Postal Inspection Service; the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Labor, and Veterans Affairs; the Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Even Small Business Administration and Railroad Retirement Board staffers pack heat!

These “ninja bureaucrats,” as Hillyer calls them, run rampant. They, and often their local-government counterparts, deploy weapons against harmless, frequently innocent, Americans who typically are accused of non-violent civil or administrative violations.

• An FDA SWAT unit struck Lancaster, Pa.’s Rainbow Acres Farm in April 2010. From there, farmer Dan Allgyer illegally had shipped unpasteurized milk to his customers across state lines through something called a “cow-sharing agreement.” (Really.) Ignoring a woman’s right to choose raw milk, Washington launched an armed federal response against this Amish-run dairy. The company subsequently folded.

“He was not tricking people into buying it, he was not forcing people to purchase it, and there had been no complaints about his product,” stated then-Representative Ron Paul (R., Tex.). “These were completely voluntary transactions, but ones that our nanny-state federal government did not approve of, and so they shut down his business.”

U.S. marshals and other federal officers also have conducted similar actions against purveyors of unauthorized milk, cheese, and even elderberry juice.

• When financial questions arose regarding the Mountain Pure Water Company, Washington did not send a few staffers to inspect documents. Instead, last spring, some 50 armed Treasury agents breached Mountain Pure’s headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. They seized 82 boxes of records, herded employees into the cafeteria, snatched their cell phones, and refused to let them consult attorneys.

“We’re the federal government,” Mountain Pure’s comptroller, Jerry Miller, says one pistol-packing fed told him. “We can do what we want, when we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

• A U.S. Department of Education SWAT force burst into Kenneth Wright’s Stockton, Calif., home in June 2011. “I look out of my window, and I see 15 police officers,” Wright told KXTV. Wright said one officer forced him by the neck onto the front lawn. “He had his knee on my back, and I had no idea why they were there.” While officers searched his house, Wright said, “They put me in handcuffs in a hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” then ages 3, 7, and 11.

The feds sought Wright’s estranged wife, apparently for suspected financial-aid fraud. However, she had moved away a year earlier. Regardless, such a mobilization seems unnecessary to probe someone for possibly swindling scholarship money.

• In August 2011, armed federal Fish and Wildlife agents stormed into the Memphis and Nashville factories of Gibson Guitar, which helps Jackson Browne, B. B. King, and other legends sound amazing. What clear and present danger did Gibson pose? Rather than import finished guitar components, it purchased raw ebony and rosewood from India so that American workers — not Indians — could manufacture fingerboards and other electric-guitar parts. Proving that there no longer is a need to write fiction, Uncle Sam’s case against Gibson is called United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms.

• “SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, sent into bars and fraternities suspected of allowing underage drinking, and even [used] to enforce alcohol and occupational licensing regulations,” including armed incursions against several black barber shops in Orlando, Fla., according to the Huffington Post’s Radley Balko, who studiously chronicles this topic. He recalls a federal SWAT outfit that invaded an Atlanta DJ’s studio on suspicion of copyright infringement. When several Tibetan monks on a peace mission overstayed their visas, a federal SWAT unit cornered them. Texas SWAT officers targeted an Austin man accused of stealing koi from a fish pond. And a Virginia SWAT squad killed optometrist Sal Culosi while arresting him for sports gambling.

Balko also has reported on SWAT teams’ reprehensible habit of killing dogs:

• In 2008, gun-toting cops stormed the home of Berwyn Heights, Md.’s mayor, Cheye Calvo. They kicked down his door and handcuffed him (in his underwear) for two hours, along with his mother-in-law. Calvo’s wife walked in during the episode and discovered that police fatally had gunned down their two black Labrador retrievers, Chase and Payton.

“Our dogs were our children,” Calvo told the Associated Press. “They were the reason we bought this house, because it had a big yard for them to run in.” Next-door neighbor Edward Alexander added: “I was completely stunned, because those dogs didn’t hurt anybody. They barely bark.”

Police seized a FedEx package containing 32 pounds of marijuana, to which Calvo was unconnected. Drug traffickers had addressed it to his house, intending to collect it from his front porch before he did. No charges were filed against the Calvos.

• On July 13, 2010, a dozen St. Paul, Minn.–area policemen and a federal Drug Enforcement Agency officer assaulted Roberto Franco’s home. Clad in Army fatigues, they rousted all nine people there, including three children. “Each plaintiff was forced to the floor at gun and rifle point and handcuffed behind their backs,” states Franco’s $30 million federal lawsuit against these authorities. “Defendants shot and killed the family dog and forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead and bloody pet for more than an hour while defendants continued to search the plaintiffs’ home.”

According to the complaint, one young girl who “was handcuffed and prevented by officer from obtaining and taking her medication thus induced a diabetic episode as a result of low blood-sugar levels.”

Oops. Wrong house!

Negligent police meant to hit the house adjacent to the Francos. The search warrant named next-door neighbor Rafael Ybarra, but did not mention anyone named Franco. Perhaps these cops forgot to read that document before launching their onslaught against the Francos, their home, and their dog.

Eventually, the SWATsters realized their error. As the complaint continues: “Despite the fact that defendants learned that the suspect did not live at the address raided, defendants remained in the home of plaintiffs and continued searching the home.” The authorities eventually found a .22-caliber revolver in the basement. Although it belonged to Gilbert Castillo, another resident of the house, the gun was pinned on Franco, leading to his incarceration with Minnesota’s Department of Corrections.

• These raids destroy humans, too.

Fearing that criminals were invading his home on May 5, 2011, Iraq veteran Jose Guerena, 26, hid his wife and son, age 4, in a closet. He grabbed his rifle and went to investigate. An Arizona SWAT posse seeking marijuana kicked down Guerena’s front door, saw his rifle, and lethally pumped 71 bullets into him. Guerena did not fire a shot. Indeed, his rifle’s safety mechanism remained engaged. The dead father and husband had no criminal record, and his home was devoid of contraband.

Why are local constables devolving into flak-jacketed federales? As usual, thank Washington’s largesse. Like a steady drip of steroids, the War on Drugs has provided funding and encouragement for local cops to gird themselves like GIs leveling an Andean coca plantation.

Furthermore, as Balko wrote in November 2011, thanks to “a 1994 law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus military equipment to local police departments . . . literally millions of pieces of equipment designed for use on a foreign battlefield have been handed over for use on U.S. streets, against U.S. citizens.” Since September 11, 2001, the War on Terror has furnished additional funds and matériel. Some of it should be available to defeat militant Islam. None of it should be used against, say, blackjack players.

The Obama administration has played its part, too. “In 2009,” Balko explains, “stimulus spending became another way to fund militarization, with police departments requesting federal cash for armored vehicles, SWAT armor, machine guns, surveillance drones, helicopters, and all manner of other tactical gear and equipment.”

Alas, when local cops who write tickets dress up like Green Berets, their attitudes can change. As former Reagan Pentagon aide Lawrence Korb pithily states: “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.”

“The routine use of SWAT teams to serve thousands and thousands of drug-search warrants has resulted in unnecessary tragedies and fueled fears of government run wild, military raids of homes in the middle of the night based more upon secret suspicions than evidence, and not infrequently causing casualties to the totally innocent,” Hoover Institution research fellow Joe McNamara tells me. The 17-year NYPD veteran and former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose adds: “The SWAT raids certainly haven’t won the drug war, but have caused ‘collateral damage’ and fears that impair the police’s ability to gain citizen trust and cooperation against serious and violent crime.”

As gun stores currently enjoy land-sale business, some Americans are arming themselves to insure against circumstances as yet unseen. They justifiably worry that a government that aims gun barrels at Amish dairy farmers is capable of the unimaginable.

— Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

The number and scope of police abuses in the US is escalating out of control.

The LAPD’s recent actions, I hope, are a tipping point where conservatives will get their heads out of the ground and stop being fawning holster-sniffers. It’s long past time to start demanding real accountability from law enforcement, and it’s even longer past due to take a pretty good whack at their compensation packages and their spending on military and para-military toys.

I was recently witness to an abandoned and empty warehouse fire, next to my place of work. It was started by some vagrants trying to keep warm, and if I had one handy, I probably could have extinguished it myself with a long garden-hose.

Instead, we had 70 firefighters on the scene, about 15 cops, paramedics, two-helicoptors - and even 2 scary-looking, totally-black Homeland Security SUV’s. Even the Red Cross had to show up with their donut truck to hand out free coffee as there were so many public-safety officials standing around doing nothing.

Just as important as the security-paranoia is to the growth of these Gov’t paramilitaries, it is also about the Gov’t funding spigots that were opened without control after 9/11, for everything from TSA to Customs to your local police department. I call it the “Bin Laden Tax.”

I think Bin Laden will destroy America after all, but even he didn’t realize how it would eventually do it.

The LAPDs recent actions, I hope, are a tipping point where conservatives will get their heads out of the ground and stop being fawning holster-sniffers. Its long past time to start demanding real accountability from law enforcement, and its even longer past due to take a pretty good whack at their compensation packages and their spending on military and para-military toys.

I agree. The troop deployment is drawing down, and there is no reason for a lot of this patriot act stuff anymore after 12 years. We can and should have a case for drawing down the American occupation. It should be as much a part of our platform as the second amendment.

I had a friend who always wanted to be a cop, he saved enough money to put himself through the Police Academy. On his first day there the instructor said,”If you think you're here to help people your wrong, you're here to bust ass and put people in jail.” He quit 2 days later, it was not what he thought it would be.

Instead, we had 70 firefighters on the scene, about 15 cops, paramedics, two-helicoptors - and even 2 scary-looking, totally-black Homeland Security SUVs. Even the Red Cross had to show up with their donut truck to hand out free coffee as there were so many public-safety officials standing around doing nothing.

This is what is alarming. You have all these goobers with brand new used mil-surp stuff looking for a mission. All dressed up and nowhere to go. And they can't wait to try out all the stuff they learned at "tactical school".

They had several, overlapping groups that did domestic police and security stuff which you could sort of equate with modern SWAT teams, but nothing exactly like SWAT.

The first was the Gestapo, “Geheim Staatspolizei” or “secret police.” The Gestapo was noted for doing all manner of surveillance and snooping, but they broke down more than a few doors in military get-up in their days to act on information.

The SD, in later days, was sorta-kinda an up-weaponed police force. But... I can’t see as much similarity to SWAT units in that the SD (and later units build off the SD) wasn’t ever really responsible for domestic law enforcement.

Then there were the SS Polezei, the SS Police, which came about when the “Green Police” (known in German as “Ordnungpolizei” or “order police”) were sucked into the SS. Before ‘39, the Ordnungpolizei did what you’d expect normal civilian police to do - domestic crime enforcement, cats up trees, public safety, etc.

After ‘39 or so, the Ordnungpolizei (or “Orpo” for short in German) were sucked into the SS, and then the Orpo acquired para-military units known as “SS Polizei Bataillione” and these yahoos would do about what SWAT does today: Dress up like infantry, but not see actual battle. Instead, they worked on terrorizing the population with various door-to-door raids, looking for pesky Jews who might be resisting the grand plans of the Nazi intellectuals, etc.

I’d count the SS Polizei Bataillione as the closest thing to modern SWAT, mostly because of the military light arms and uniforms (including the coal-scuttle helmets), but never seeing actual combat. That comes pretty close to describing SWAT teams today: Lots of donut-munchers playing dress-up.

The Waffen SS was a personal infantry and mechanized infantry force of Hitler’s, and they weren’t really involved in any police work. They did for-real military engagements and killing on the front lines, often as shock troops who were sworn to die before retreating.

Vince Ferrer: “...there is no reason for a lot of this patriot act stuff anymore after 12 years.”

Agreed. You’d think there would be popular support, from traditional liberals as well as people on the right, to roll this police state crap back. I grew up thinking the police were my friends. Now I want nothing to do with them, as I see any interaction as potentially negative. It doesn’t even matter if I’m a law-abiding citizen (as much as that’s possible in this day and age of laws for virtually everything). The best one can hope from an interaction with the police (or the completely arbitrary legal system) is that one escapes relatively unharmed.

Unless we want a true police state, we need leaders willing to tackle asset forfeiture, militarization of police, and criminalization of relatively benign acts. We need to restore the constitutional protections of private property and freedom from search and seizure without probable cause and a warrant.

I think Bin Laden will destroy America after all, but even he didnt realize how it would eventually do it.

Well, my father did say, "the terrorists have won" when you see things like this, the DHS and TSA. Myself, I know the cops have a tough job to do but militarization is not the answer. In my opinion, we need to disband SWAT teams and return the cops to the original role. They need to go back to the revolver/handgun and for a long gun, a shotgun is good enough. Maybe a rifle like a .30-30 or a M1903 Springfield for extreme cases needing such things. No heavy vehicles either, they are there to patrol and catch the bad guys not to take a V-150 armored car and pretend they are going after the Viet-Cong or Al Quaida.

I believe the Stanford Prison Experiment is a seminal experiment in human behavior, and has a lot to say about government/citizen and police/citizen relations, not just prisoner/warden relations.

If the psychology can be applied across the population, the act of creating a police state will create its opposite as well, terrorist organizations. Terrorists, and terror organizations will form that wouldn't have even existed had the police not become so militarized.

‘a Virginia SWAT squad killed optometrist Sal Culosi while arresting him for sports gambling.’ I recall this case in the late 1980’s I think,and it was not the usual SWAT storm trooper action. Culosi, who ran part of a sports book had been arrested and was sitting handcuffed in a police cruiser when a Fairfax County Police Department officer accidentally squeezed the trigger of his service pistol as he was holstering it. The round went through the front seat back and hit the unfortunate Dr. Culosi killing him instantly. The case disappeared from the press and I have no idea what the disposition was.

Instead, we had 70 firefighters on the scene, about 15 cops, paramedics, two-helicoptors - and even 2 scary-looking, totally-black Homeland Security SUVs. Even the Red Cross had to show up with their donut truck to hand out free coffee as there were so many public-safety officials standing around doing nothing.

That would be the gubmint. You pay for them in every paycheck.

Think how much bigger your paycheck would be without those parasites. The warehouses fire might have been more (or less) interesting. But fires go out when there's nothing left to burn. However, government only increases. And entitlements are forever.

Soon there won’t be a need for armed federal SWAT teams when Obama can just order a missile strike from a circling drone. Selling raw milk from your farm, suspected of having an unapproved firearm or having too many people at your home Bible study could soon mean a federal agency sending a missile through your front door. Hitler could only have dreamed of such power

when local cops who write tickets dress up like Green Berets, their attitudes can change. As former Reagan Pentagon aide Lawrence Korb pithily states: Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.

up is down, black is white...our troops are handcuffed with *rules of engagement* and forced to show restraint in the face of hardened bad guys on foreign battlefield, getting charged and ruined for protecting themselves, while domestically, barney in kevlar is shooting labradors and their owners at the wrong house and getting *paid admin leave* and promotions...

RE “up is down, black is white...our troops are handcuffed with *rules of engagement* and forced to show restraint in the face of hardened bad guys on foreign battlefield, getting charged and ruined for protecting themselves, while domestically, barney in kevlar is shooting labradors and their owners at the wrong house and getting *paid admin leave* and promotions...”

Post 9/11 man. These heavily armed troops are ‘keeping you safe’. Bush era Republicans lectured us that patriots dont need no stinkin constitutional rights. Remember those envelopes with powder and the sniper?

Those big gubment Republicans never imagined that Dems would take power.

Keep complaining and the drone over your head will pay you a visit.

39
posted on 02/12/2013 4:56:08 AM PST
by sickoflibs
(Losing to Dems and Obama is not a principle! Its just losing.)

Instead, we had 70 firefighters on the scene, about 15 cops, paramedics, two-helicoptors - and even 2 scary-looking, totally-black Homeland Security SUVs. Even the Red Cross had to show up with their donut truck to hand out free coffee as there were so many public-safety officials standing around doing nothing.

That would not happen in my rural county (Red Cross coffee). The reason why we get all those firefighters and cops at the empty warehouses (not a fire, just an alarm) is so they can "socialize". If you think socializing involves coffee, then you are thinking about the wrong beverage.

This is why conservatives need to get off their butts and elect constitutional sheriff in their counties.

After Katrina, a county sheriff posted armed deputies at critical locations and refused to allow federal thugs inside his county.

Sheriffs have met armed federal thugs in their counties and chased them out. One sheriff told federal fascists that if they entered his county with armed SWAT he would mobilize his SWAT team and engage them. The federal pigs ran away.

With a constitutional sheriff you can:

1. Protect your neighborhood.

2. Buy surplus military equipment.

3. Investigate, arrest and imprison leftists in your comunity.

4. Muster a 2,000 man auxiliary deputy force for “emergencies.”

Now I know it’s difficult to stop remodeling the kitchen, turn off the barbecue grill and stop worshipping the false god mammon, but if you don’t get involved, you’ll lose everything you’ve worked for, including your children.

42
posted on 02/12/2013 6:07:59 AM PST
by sergeantdave
(The FBI has declared war on the Marine Corps)

The routine use of SWAT teams to serve thousands and thousands of drug-search warrants has resulted in unnecessary tragedies and fueled fears of government run wild, military raids of homes in the middle of the night based more upon secret suspicions than evidence, and not infrequently causing casualties to the totally innocent, Hoover Institution research fellow Joe McNamara tells me. The 17-year NYPD veteran and former police chief of Kansas City and San Jose adds: The SWAT raids certainly havent won the drug war, but have caused collateral damage and fears that impair the polices ability to gain citizen trust and cooperation against serious and violent crime.

I wonder how one of these local jack boots would feel if a group of federal jack boots invaded their home and forced him and his family to sit handcuffed on the floor for 6 hours. Plus shot the dog in front of the kids.

I know a guy who is very conservative who voted for Kerry because of Bush’s Patriot Act. He said he knew Kerry would be a lousy president but the Patriot Act was too far over the top.

45
posted on 02/12/2013 9:33:27 AM PST
by Terry Mross
(How long before America is no more?)

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